NPEW 2025: Now Foods looks at wellness trends shaping future supplement industry
17 Mar 2025 | Now
On the trade show floor, Jim Emme, the CEO of Now Foods, spoke with us about the drivers behind the company’s innovation in supplements, sports nutrition, and natural foods. He discusses Gen Z’s demand for wellness products, the rise of GLP-1-related weight management, and the growing need for multivitamins as diets change. He also reveals how NOW Foods stays ahead of global trends with its focus on healthy aging, natural ingredients, and clean-label solutions.
This is Yolanda Pernell from Nutrition Insight.
I'm here at Natural Products Expo West with Jim Emmy, who is the CEO of Foods.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for the opportunity, Yolanda.
You're very welcome, and I'm really curious because I know you have multiple groups at the show and you're showcasing lots of different products, and I'm wondering what drives innovation now in terms of supplements, sports nutrition, or natural food.
It actually comes from all of them.
We started out as a retailer in the Chicago area.
We still have 10 retail stores there, and a, a health food retailer in the United States will carry foods, will carry supplements, will carry personal care, and, and even, , items to, to help with other, other goals that they have to live a healthier lifestyle.
So we gather knowledge from foods.
Oftentimes water foods end up that are beneficial, end up being developed through the scientists of our raw material vendors into the supplements, and then extensions sometimes from supplements can go into personal care like vitamin E, for example, vitamin D, vitamin C, all those are used in many facial products and personal care.
So we come at it from different angles and we see that there's a lot of synergy between the three things that all came back from our health food store roots.
Interesting.
And can you talk a bit about key trends or consumer shifts that you believe will shape the future of wellness?
My gosh, I think that all the studies we're seeing from Generation Z is extremely engaged on their wellness right now.
Millennials.
Have been more so, but there's a trend of Gen Z going back into brick and mortar retail stores.
They're willing to order online, in those stores in order to get the product they want, but they want to ask questions.
They want to talk to someone.
They want, they want to touch and feel the product if they can.
That's.
One trend that's happening, the other trend that is shaping it are GLP-1s and weight loss.
That's happening worldwide.
We've seen some data in the last two days at the show here that are showing that any product that's active, sports products, proteins, vegetables, and, and whey.
Amino acids, energy products are all contributing to that as.
We're also hearing that trends are happening with, multivitamins because people are eating less.
They're getting less nutrients, so therefore they need to supplement at a little bit higher dose than what they might from a traditional supplement.
That's influencing it as , and I think people are being more sensitive to their skincare.
Anti-aging has always been helpful, but there are no magic bullets to that.
You have to be sensitive to it and start early, and we've got a product line that can help with all those things, but we feel it's going to shape the market globally.
We're sold.
92 countries, so we get exposure with our business partners in the regions that teach us these things, but we believe that those things at the current state of business are going to influence things for decades to come.
Very interesting.
And for your company itself, how are you preparing to remain at the forefront of You know those changes that you were just talking about.
We're working with our business partners on their innovative products.
We're a science-based company, so therefore we want ingredients that have science behind them, be them through randomized clinical trials.
We want purity and quality.
That's part of our core values that we have.
We're building manufacturing capacity not just in the United States, but in other spots in North America and Canada, and we're working with some joint ventures with some business partners either in Asia or in parts of Europe to help us with the capacity to meet these needs and while still maintaining our quality standards.
Interesting, and you already mentioned the science-backed formulations that you're focusing on.
I'm also curious, how do you balance that with evolving consumer demands for taste, convenience, and clean labels?
It's clean labels are part of her core values.
We believe that natural is better.
Natural isn't always possible.
For example, a B complex vitamin.
Personal care item or in a in a supplement, almost all of it is synthetic because you can't get the dose levels of international units you need, to help you nutritionally, so in that case we compromise and we go through a synthetic, but we make sure it's a pure synthetic produced in a manner that's non-GMO, non, no, no.
AI generated sequencing with DNA and we're we're focusing on that.
We're built on a on a partnership with our consumers of where they trust us.
We're the largest family owned natural products company in the United States.
They trust the fact that we're family owned because our values are such we always stay true to our pillars of our core values.
So that's that drives us, that's our North Star that guides us to make sure that we deliver the best we can with clean formulas, with effective formulas, and that what's on the label is really in the product.
And being a science-based company, we have over 200 associates in our quality teams, and we have over 100 that are degree chemists that are doing formulations but also doing our in-house analysis to test our products.
We're extremely confident that consumers can trust us and will believe in us that what's on the label is actually in the product, whether it's an essential oil, a, skin care.
Product or a supplement that they'll ingest.
And I'm also curious how you integrate social responsibility in the broader business strategy now.
Our company is based on the values of do the right things for the right reasons.
It's very fundamental.
Some people may think it's common sense, but it's easy to drift from that as you get big and as you've grown through the years as a company like we have.
And that's where our core values come in again.
We believe that you have to give back because we've been given so much of the opportunities that we've had, and we're grateful, but that gratitude needs to be expressed in our actions.
We've reduced the plastics levels in our products.
We've got our our packaging has gone to mostly post-consumer recycle.
We want to make sure that we've got a sustainable.
Source for the ingredients that we're getting and we want to support local communities with our business partners no matter where they work out through the world because those communities support us and we need to support them too and again it all comes back to our core values and fundamentally doing the right things for the right reasons.
